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Hello, thank you for joining us. We are proud to welcome you to our special series, Survival by Degrees, brought to you by Brill, where we talk about climate crisis and what tackling it really entails. I'm your host, Lee Jungraco. Today we're speaking with Dr.
Nicholas Graham, he's a postdoctoral researcher and instructor of sociology at the University of Victoria in Victoria, Canada. His book is Forces of Production, Climate Change, and Canadian Fossil Capitalism. Dr. Graham, thanks so much for sitting down with us.
Thanks a lot for having me and thanks for your interest in my work. So we've already had a dire warning from a UN panel on climate change in 2018. The panel then declared that we have less than 12 years to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by half and get on target to reach zero emissions by 2050. Where are we on that goal and what happens if we don't meet it?
Yeah, well, since 2018, since that warning, we've made little progress. Global emissions grew in 2019. There was a reduction in 2020 due largely to the impacts of COVID, but not by much. In the latest projections that I've seen global carbon emissions are set for a large increase for 2021.
The intergovernmental panel on climate change, the IPCC, has released a new major report that some of the listeners might have seen. It's called Climate Change 2021. It's part of the IPCC's sixth major climate assessment. So this is the physical side of the assessment.
The IPCC has broken up into three working groups in the statistical science side. It includes the reporting includes a number of emissions scenarios and almost all of them, including the most radical emissions reduction scenarios. The group studied global warming is expected to hit 1.5 degrees Celsius in the early 2030s, which is considered widely considered and extremely dangerous threshold of warming. The report includes projections that are based more or less on a business as usual, based on what is currently being done under existing climate plans, if more ambitious measures are not taken.
The business as usual scenario is leading us towards a warming in the range of three degrees Celsius by the end of the century. The effects of that would be truly catastrophic. In the case of three degrees Celsius warming, a sea level rise of one to up to two meters is predicted by the end of the century. Extreme heat, forest fires, severe drought, flash floods, and more are all predicted.
So I guess just to give our listeners a better look at this, how it might affect their everyday lives. For example, here in the US, we have wildfires on the West Coast, we have had these flash floods over New York. If climate change doesn't get under control, how regular do those sorts of phenomenon's become? Yeah, they become much more common and they grow in increasing intensity and severity.
So definitely as you're saying today, weather extremes are one of the ways in which a lot of people are directly experiencing climate change, especially in global North countries in North America and Canada. As you're saying, we're seeing these huge storms right now, flash flooding in New York and Toronto that I was just looking at earlier this summer in British Columbia, where I live. In parts of northwest US, we experienced what was called a heat dome. It reached 50 degrees Celsius in one part of BC, the highest temperature ever recorded in Canada.
The heat dome caused thousands of heat related deaths. It's heat waves more generally have led as you're saying to increased force fires nearly every summer, burning longer, burning more intensely. The force fires that have placed in Australia a couple of years ago gathered a lot of global attention. I think a lot of people saw that and of course, experienced in Australia.
So I do think this is a way that a lot of people have directed experience with climate change. It's well understood, a kind of general truth that those in the global south and poor people in those regions face the most severe current and future predicted effects. This is partially related to things like rising sea level, sea levels from melting glaciers, which will directly affect low-lying island populations, densely settled areas like Bangladesh. So climate change exacerbates existing inequalities, but this last year and increasingly the impact of climate change are felt in the corner in every corner of the world.
So then taken back to your work, how would a Marxist approach help us understand the climate crisis right now? Yeah, so it's a big question. Marxism can be described as a kind of science of capitalism, if you like. It sets out to analyze capitalism's deep structures, its tendencies and contradictions, its positive potentials and also its perils.
So capitalism is a particular kind of society. It's built on private and today corporate control over land and technology, and it's premised on the exploitation of wage labor. It also involves and profoundly shapes the relationship between human beings and the rest of nature, non-human nature, including the climate system. Understanding this relation between demanding the rest of nature is the subject of much what is referred to as ecomorphism, or ecological marches.
So really broadly, we can see how our relation to nature within capitalism is driven by a growth imperative, or the quest to accumulate capital to grow a profit at a compound rate. This imperative has led at a broad level to rising energy and matter consumption, or was sometimes called throughput. This treadmill of accumulation, treadmill of production produces various waste as those a huge amount of energy and matter consumed, and that includes the oxide emissions. So here, I think it's not too difficult to see a major tension, if not an outright contradiction between this growth imperative and the stability of the climate system.
What I've tried to do in my work is to contribute to this body of research in part by rethinking the concept of forces of production. This is an important concept within the Marxist tradition. It's also found within liberal political economy. I suggest rethinking this concept of forces of production in ecological terms, or from an ecological standpoint.
This in turn leads us to think about how there is aspects of forces of production. So things like technology, infrastructures, and forms of knowledge through which our relationship to nature is mediated, through which it takes place, have been built around a systemic drive for profit, often over or in place of their contribution to human well-being, or ecosystem health. This rethinking then points to how forces of production will need to be extensively transformed and recomposed in response to the climate crisis. In some cases, this may involve a retreat, so a scaling back of some destructive practices and forces.
In other cases, what is needed is a growth and expanded use of what I call green productive forces, so things like renewable energy, green infrastructures, so things like public transportation that is sustainable, ecological thinking and knowledge itself, for example. But our current economic and political system poses serious obstacles to that process of transformation. In other words, in a kind of Marxist terminology, their development is constrained by relations of production. So I guess then to take us back a little further, because with Marxist ideology, you're talking about how we have to transform our existing capitalist system in order to save ourselves from this climate crisis.
So take us back before that and explain what is fossil capitalism and how does it become embedded in our everyday lives over the last two centuries now? Sure, yeah, that's a great question. Fossil capitalism is a kind of conceptual lens. I would say it points to the key role of fossil fuels in mediating that societal relationship to nature and fueling economic growth since the late 18th and early 19th century.
So beginning at that point, the huge growth in the output of goods, the development of long-distance transportation associated with early industrial capitalism is premised on the production and consumption of fossil fuels. But this relationship between economic growth and fossil fuels has only deepened since the 19th century or since the Industrial Revolution. There was a massive growth in the production consumption of fossil fuels after the Second World War. So private mobility, suburbanization, agriculture and food, other forms of everyday consumables all became very bound up with fossil fuels.
Fast-forwarding contemporary neoliberal globalization beginning in the 1980s has also entailed a huge expansion of fossil power. So you can think about how long-distance commodity transports, so things being produced on the other side of the world and being transported across the world, those networks are powered by fossil fuel energy, for example. So this has led to a huge increase in consumption. So the term fossil capitalism points to how fossil fuels have then become embedded in essentially entire economic structure.
This is the immediate source of the climate crisis. This literature on fossil capitalism also points to major past dependencies, economic lock-in posed by this embedding and the huge challenge of decarbonization. Decarbonization and energy transition is understood as a massive challenge that will require major and political cultural economic transformation based essentially on forms of collective action. So the transition in this approach is understood to involve struggle, conflict and confrontation with power.
You already talked about how this is embedded within Canada's economic system. What's the relationship then between fossil capitalism and politics in Canada? Yeah, as you're suggesting, in the last decade or so, there's been a major expansion of the fossil fuel industry in Canada, which is now an economically dominant sector. Fossil fuel development has largely involved the growth of what are called unconventional fossil fuels.
So shale gas, this is gas that is trapped in shale rock formations that are deeply buried. It needs to be fracked. So it's a fracked gas in tar sands, which probably a lot of listeners have heard of before, which is really thick dense form of vitamin that's based in Alberta that involves extensive mining and also processing in order to make it usable oil. As an economically prominent industry, the fossil fuel sector and other sectors like the finance industry, which is heavily invested in fossil fuels, exercise a great deal.
A power and influence over politics and over popular and public opinion, ultimately with the aim of protecting profits, promoting business as usual. So the fossil fuel sector in Canada that is in other places is in the US, for example, is very active politically through channels like political lobbying, like funding and helping govern think tanks and other civil society organizations to help secure consent and support behind the industry. As in many other places, there is an ongoing effort by the industry to not only protect existing production production networks, but also to expand them through new large scale pipeline projects. All is said, there is a significant amount of public and popular opposition to the industry.
Much of the resistance in mobilization in Canada has been led by First Nations communities whose land and self determination has often been threatened by large scale fossil fuel projects. Overall, I'd say there's been a somewhat defensive orientation to mobilizations and emphasis on blocking of individual fossil fuel projects. This opposition is important, it's often been effective. It prefigures and is accompanied by more transformative climate justice movements.
But arguably that side has been somewhat weak. An organization behind political projects like theoretical versions of the Green New Deal perhaps hasn't been as strong as in the US or in many parts of Europe. Transformative movements and climate divisions were gaining momentum prior to COVID. And hopefully that momentum will be regained.
Just at the governmental state politics level, clean growth or climate capitalist frame that emphasizes market based measures, things like carbon taxes, carbon offsets, and really incremental change, which in the Canadian context maintains or even allows for expansion of fossil fuel sector in the short term predominates, at least federally in politics. So this kind of market-centric clean growth is the official climate policy of the federal liberal government. We have an upcoming federal election here in Canada. And none of the existing parties, I would say, are offering anything significantly more ambitious.
There's a major disjuncture between what climate science is telling us as we're discussing at the outset and formal political action. Movement coalitions, the organization of civil society has a key role to play in really shifting the dynamic of governmental and state politics. But transforming political parties and state priorities has been hugely challenging here in Canada as it has been in other places. I think actually, as you were talking about how fossil fuels have really thrived in Canada under this new liberal system, I was thinking of your current Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau.
I'm wondering if you can talk a bit about his stance when it comes to fossil fuels. He seems like an interesting figure where he is socially rather liberal, but when it comes to fossil fuels in Canada, he seems rather conservative or maybe as you've described, given that the liberal government hasn't planned anything that ambitious. I guess he's just sort of telling lines, so to speak. Yeah.
And I think this kind of clean growth approach, which is what's being called in Canada and by the Liberals, it kind of walks a little bit of a middle ground by talking about and referring to energy transition. As a major necessity in the near future, it talks the talk of climate politics. But then as you're saying, it's kind of brokerage politics of doing that on the one side and then green lighting fossil fuel expansion projects on the other hand. And as many, many people have pointed out the two, just can't go together.
You can't meet climate commitments and expand fossil fuel extraction and transport at the same time. And so there's quite a bit with the federal government of talking to talk of climate action, but not really walking to walk in terms of actual action in terms of shift. And so it's interesting, away from a fossil fuel dependent economy. So just to wrap up, you state that there's no blank slate upon which an alternative energy system can be constructed.
So what's the way out of today's carbon society for Canada and for the rest of the world? Yeah. The point about a blank slate surrounds sort of material conditions of opportunity and constraint. So, you know, we need to think about the transformation of existing energy systems into an alternative system.
People rely on energy networks, other aspects of productive forces to meet everyday needs. So we need to think about transition beginning from and within the material conditions we find ourselves in. This is a reality, but it doesn't mean I would suggest that an alternative energy system based on renewable energy needs to replace the existing one grid for grid pipe for pipe or tool for tool. We need to think in my view, we can think about and imagine a significant overall reduction of the energy that is produced and consumed, at least in a global north.
And we can think about the construction of a more decentralized energy system, where a significant amount of the development takes place at a community scale, for example. So renewables, renewable energy is key, but there's a lot to think about in terms of how they will be brought about and by whom. So, as I argue in the book, the development of renewable energy, which is a key component of what I call green force of production, is today constrained and blocked by relations of production to use of terminology, but namely profit motive or power. So to develop renewables at speed at scale, there is a need for new forms of public ownership, I suggest, public finance and direct forms of economic and democratic planning.
These are key components of a pathway towards kind of perine socialism in the 21st century. This is a, you know, thinking about an alternative that is built on the democratic transformation and reorientation of various productive forces towards meeting human need and ecosystem health and flourish. Dr. Graham, really fascinating conversation here.
Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us today. Thank you so much for having me and nice to meet you. Dr. Nicholas Graham, his book is forces of production, climate change and Canadian fossil capitalism.
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